Three generations, no imbeciles : eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell

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Three generations, no imbeciles : eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell

Paul A. Lombardo

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008

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注記

Includes bibliographical references and index

内容説明・目次

内容説明

"Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Few lines from Supreme Court opinions are as memorable as this declaration by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the landmark 1927 case Buck v. Bell. The ruling allowed states to forcibly sterilize residents in order to prevent "feebleminded and socially inadequate" people from having children. It is the only time the Supreme Court endorsed surgery as a tool of government policy. Paul Lombardo's startling narrative exposes the Buck case's fraudulent roots. In 1924 Carrie Buck-involuntarily institutionalized by the State of Virginia after she was raped and impregnated-challenged the state's plan to sterilize her. Having already judged her mother and daughter mentally deficient, Virginia wanted to make Buck the first person sterilized under a new law designed to prevent hereditarily "defective" people from reproducing. Lombardo's more than twenty-five years of research and his own interview with Buck before she died demonstrate conclusively that she was destined to lose the case before it had even begun. Neither Carrie Buck nor her mother and daughter were the "imbeciles" condemned in the Holmes opinion. Her lawyer-a founder of the institution where she was held-never challenged Virginia's arguments and called no witnesses on Buck's behalf. And judges who heard her case, from state courts up to the U.S. Supreme Court, sympathized with the eugenics movement. Virginia had Carrie Buck sterilized shortly after the 1927 decision. Though Buck set the stage for more than sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations in the United States and was cited at the Nuremberg trials in defense of Nazi sterilization experiments, it has never been overturned. Three Generations, No Imbeciles tracks the notorious case through its history, revealing that it remains a potent symbol of government control of reproduction and a troubling precedent for the human genome era.

目次

Introduction Prologue: The Expert Witness 1. Problem Families 2. Sex and Surgery 3. The Pedigree Factory 4. Studying Sterilization 5. The Mallory Case 6. Laughlin's Book 7. A Virginia Sterilization Law 8. Choosing Carrie Buck 9. Carrie Buck versus Dr. Priddy 10. Defenseless 11. On Appeal: Buck v. Bell 12. In the Supreme Court 13. Reactions and Repercussions 14. After the Supreme Court 15. Sterilizing Germans 16. Skinner v. Oklahoma 17. Buck, at Nuremberg and After 18. Rediscovering Buck Epilogue: Reconsidering Buck Acknowledgments

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